Why Is Life So Hard?
Andrew Bennett, CHT
Everyone struggles and has problems that they’re trying to overcome. You can find the most successful looking person in the world, and you can know for sure that they are struggling. People only ever present their best self to others and they hide their worst self. That person that you see on Instagram and Facebook, that’s who they want to be, but who they are is somebody much more complicated.
That’s because big problems don’t come from life, they come from inside. That’s really hard for people to believe at first, but you can often see it in others. You probably know somebody who is struggling, and you know exactly how they could fix it but they never do. You’re probably one of those people. In fact, I’ll bet that if you could talk to yourself, you would have a ton of really great advice that you'd never follow.
People get caught in this cycle all the time. They know exactly what they need to do, but they never feel like they can actually do it. It’s not because they're bad, lazy, or don’t care. It’s because at some point in their life, they decided subconsciously that’s who they are. That they can’t ever do, or be, any better.
You can’t understand human behavior without understanding the subconscious mind.
Your subconscious mind is built for survival first. What’s the point of objective truth if you don’t live to see tomorrow? So when a trauma happens, your subconscious mind searches for any solution to prevent it in the future. Your subconscious doesn’t worry about whether it’s the perfect solution or whether it’s going to be healthy for you later on. Your subconscious is worried about surviving right now, and if it causes problems later, at least you made it to later. It also uses the logic that you had available at that time, so if something happens when you're 6 years old, you're stuck with the solution a 6 year old would come up with until the next time you re-evaluate your plan.
My mom is a powerful woman. She's strong, tenacious, and driven, but she also struggles with anger and anxiety. As a kid, there wasn’t any point in trying to defend myself or explain my side of things to my mom when she was angry, because anything I said would just cause the situation to escalate. When you’re 4 years old and somebody six times your size is furious at you, that’s pretty scary. And since anything I said would just make things even worse, I decided internally that it was stupid to even try speaking up, or responding at all. The safest option was to stay quiet and keep my head down. I decided it was pointless to try.
That decision made sense at the time, and it makes sense in that context, but in other contexts it’s a really harmful decision. That's the nature of trauma. Your subconscious often over-generalizes the decisions you make in a split-second decision, and it rarely re-evaluates them later on. So later on, when speaking up and putting in effort was the difference between success and failure, a belief like “there’s no point in trying” was devastating to my own personal success. And I never even knew why, I just thought I was lazy.
"There must be something wrong with me."
"I must just be a bad person."
It never even occurred to me that those two things could be connected, because the connection isn’t logical; it’s emotional. If you don’t understand that, you could suffer for your entire life, and that whole time be blaming yourself for it.
Look around at your fellow people in the world. Many of them are completely miserable. No matter how much they make, no matter how successful they get, they are always living in the shadow of themselves. The things that matter most can’t be bought, they have to be learned.
Knowing deep down at a subconscious level that you are loved, that you matter, that you are good enough, that you are capable, that you are right as a person, you could be one of the poorest people on the planet and still be more content than anybody you know.
In the same way that “there’s no point in trying” absolutely devastated my life for years, a healthy belief will also affect every part of your life. More energy, more willingness to try new things, more curiosity, more motivation to succeed, more life. And when you think of a dynamic, energetic, powerful person, it’s hard to imagine them not succeeding.
But it can’t just be a conscious, surface-level decision. It has to be one that you change at a deep level, at the core of your being. This is what people refer to as an epiphone, a paradigm shift, or a moment of enlightenment. That’s the part of mental health that many therapies often fall short on, and it’s one of the foundations of hypnotherapy. Change at a deep level is what hypnosis is all about.
For me, the healthy belief was “You are brave.” The knowledge that success and failure are both a point of pride in myself makes all the difference in the world. Nothing I do will ever feel pointless again.